Resistencia: The Translators
JACK AGÜEROS
Jack Agüeros was a Puerto Rican poet, community activist, and translator. Born in New York City, he served a crucial role in promoting the inclusion of Puerto Rican artists in the American art world. He directed the influential El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem from 1977 to 1986. He eventually guided it “to embody the culture of all of Latin America.” In 1979, he co-founded the annual Museum Mile Festival on Fifth Avenue. Agüeros published many poems and translations, was frequently anthologized, and was the author of three books of poetry: Lord, Is This a Psalm? (2002), Sonnets from the Puerto Rican (1996), and Correspondence Between the Stone Haulers (1991), all published by Hanging Loose Press. His collection of Julia de Burgos translations, Songs of the Simple Truth, was published by Cornerstone in 1997. In 2012, Agüeros received the Asan World Prize for Poetry.
JEAN ANDREWS
Jean Andrews is an associate professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has written academic articles on several women poets and is presently engaged in an academic study of women’s poetry in Spain and Portugal in the years 1936–1975. She edited the Spanish Civil War poetry of Carmen Conde, Mientras los hombres mueren (Manchester University Press) and translated it for a separate publication, While the Men Are Dying (Arima). She translated the late eighteenth-century Lament of Eileen O’Connell from Gaelic in Sí-Orphans of the Plaintive Air (Arima) and is currently working on a translation of the work of the forgotten Portuguese mid-twentieth-century poet, Maria Valupi. She has published five volumes of her own poetry. Working with Nancy Morejón on “Black Woman” was her first foray into poetry translation proper and she is forever grateful to Nancy for her kindness.
HÉLÈNE CARDONA
Hélène Cardona is a poet, translator, and actor, the recipient of over 20 honors & awards, including the Independent Press and International Book Awards, Naji Naaman Prize, Hemingway Grant, and Goethe-Institut and Andalucía International University fellowships. She authored, more recently, the collections Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves, and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux), and Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb. Her work has been translated into 16 languages. Fluent in six languages, she holds an MA in American Literature from the Sorbonne, worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy, and taught at Hamilton College and LMU. Acting credits include Chocolat, Star Trek: Picard, Ford V. Ferrari, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Happy Feet 2, and Serendipity among many. She co-produced the award-winning documentary Femme.
MEGAN COXE
Megan Coxe is a translator and writer whose work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Poetry Quarterly, and the End of Austin, among other publications. She has a masters in Hispanic Literatures from the University of Texas at Austin and has continued to engage with Latin American creative traditions through her fiction and translation work. Most recently, her translations were included in the 2018 biography by Mark Eisner, Neruda: The Biography of a Poet.
CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS
Caronlina De Robertis, a writer of Uruguayan origins, is the author of four novels, most recently Cantoras, which received a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, and was a Kirkus Prize finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. As a literary translator, De Robertis has rendered award-winning works by Laura Restrepo, Alejandro Zambra, Ray Loriga, Raquel Lubartowski Nogara, Roberto Ampuero, Marcos Aguinis, and Pedro Almodóvar, among others. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis on its 100 List of “people, organizations, and movements that are shaping the future of culture.” She teaches at San Francisco State University and lives in Oakland, California, with her wife and two children.
ANNA DEENY MORALES
Anna Deeny Morales is a dramatist, translator of poetry, and literary critic. Recent adaptations of Spanish zarzuelas include Cecilia Valdés (2018) and La Paloma at the Wall (2019), both commissioned by the In Series and performed at Gala Hispanic Theater. Her one-act opera libretto, ¡ZAVALA-ZAVALA!: an opera in v cuts, commissioned by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and composer Brian Arreola, will debut in 2021. A 2018 National Endowment for the Arts recipient for the translation of Tala by Gabriela Mistral, Deeny Morales has translated poetry by Raúl Zurita, Mercedes Roffé, Amanda Berenguer, Malú Urriola, Nicanor Parra, and Marosa di Giorgio, among others. Her translation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diana’s Tree is forthcoming from Shearsman Press in 2020. She received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at Georgetown University. Her book manuscript, Other Solitudes, considers trans-American dialogues on consciousness and poetry.
KRISTIN DYKSTRA
Kristin Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Cuban writer Reina María Rodríguez (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019, with Nancy Gates Madsen), winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She guestedited “Out of Alamar,” a dossier about poet Juan Carlos Flores (1962–2016) for The Chicago Review in 2018, and her translation of Cubanology, a multilingual book of days by Omar Pérez, appeared in the same year. Previously, she translated four books of contemporary Cuban poetry for the University of Alabama Press, including The World as Presence by Marcelo Morales, longlisted for the National Translation Award.
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN has translated a diverse array of voices throughout his influential career, including Antonin Artaud and Aimé Césaire. His forty-five years working on César Vallejo culminated in The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (2017). It was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Landon Translation Prize, two decades after Eshleman first won it for Vallejo’s masterpiece, Trilce (1992). Eshleman also won the 1979 National Book Award for Translation for The Complete Posthumous Poetry of Vallejo. Author of numerous books of his own poetry, Eshleman also founded and edited the innovative journals, Caterpillar and Sulfur. A combination of poetry and prose, his Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld, charts Eshleman’s long fascination with the prehistoric cave paintings of southwestern France. It was published in 2003, the same year he was named Emeritus professor of English at Eastern Michigan University.
GEORGE EVANS
George Evans is a poet, political writer, and translator. A veteran of the Vietnam American War, his writings reflect his dedication as an antiwar activist, homeless advocate, and overall promoter of social change. The winner of fellowships from the California Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is the author of five books of poetry including The New World (Curbstone Press, 2002) and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House Press, 1991). He has also published two volumes of translations, both from Curbstone Press: The Time Tree (2003), by the Vietnamese poet Huu Thinh, and The Violent Foam (2002), by his wife, the Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora. They live in San Francisco.
CARL FISCHER
Carl Fischer is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Fordham University; he also teaches in Fordham’s Latin American and Latinx Studies Institute. Carl is the author of Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence, 1965–2015 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) and the co-editor of Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World (Wayne State University Press, 2020). He has published scholarly articles on Latin American literature, gender studies, and film in journals such as Hispanic Review, American Quarterly, Comunicación y medios, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER
David William Foster was Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, where he was head of the program in Spanish and Portuguese. His research focused on urban culture in Latin America, with special emphasis on Buenos Aires and São Paulo and on gender issues and Jewish diasporic culture, and later on urban photography. His book, The City as Photographic Text: The Urban Photography of São Paulo, is forthcoming with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Foster undertook numerous translations of Latin American literary works, including classics of Chicano literature originally written in Spanish.
KATHERINE M. HEDEEN
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation Grants in the US, and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is the associate editor for Action Books and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Ohio, where she is professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, the son of migrant farm workers, was named California’s Poet Laureate in 2012 and served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate (2015–2017), the first Latino poet to receive this honor. He received an Educational Opportunity Program scholarship to attend UCLA, where he became active in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. He later earned an MA in Social Anthropology from Stanford and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Herrera’s numerous poetry collections include 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007, winner of the PEN West Poetry Award and the PEN Oakland National Literary Award for 2008, and Notes on the Assemblage, named a 2015 New Yorker Best Book of the Year (both volumes from City Lights Books). Passionate about writing for young people, Herrera has also published many books for children and middle-grade readers, such as his lauded work Jabberwalking (Candlewick, 2018), aimed at inspiring young poets.
JACK HIRSCHMAN
JACK HIRSCHMAN is poet laureate emeritus of San Francisco. He has translated Dalton (Spanish), Depestre (French), Pasolini (Italian), Pastakas (Greek), Gervalla (Albanian), Kirsch (German), Glik (Yiddish), Laraque (Haitian), Mayakovsky (Russian), Stalin (Georgian/Groozy). The Arcanes, Hirschman’s thousand-page masterwork of his own verse, was published in 2006.
JOAN JARA
Joan Jara is a British-born dancer, choreographer, and political activist. In the 1950s, touring Europe with the famed modern dance company, Balletts Joos, she married a fellow member, a Chilean. They moved to Santiago where she taught dance to theater students at the University of Chile. Her husband left her in 1960. In 1961 she met Victor Jara, a student in the theater school. Victor would become a legendary singer; Joan continued to teach. After Victor was tortured and assassinated following the military’s 1973 coup, Joan fled with their two daughters to England. She returned in 1983, the same year she published a memoir, Victor: An Unfinished Song. She has fought tirelessly for human rights and for justice for her husband and other victims of the regime. In 1999, she received a dance award from the Municipality of Santiago. In 2009, the Chilean Senate awarded her Chilean nationality for her work to promote a return to democracy.
TOM JONES
TOM JONES is a poet, translator, educator, and international human rights lawyer, an honors graduate of Harvard University (BA 1965), Columbia University School of Law (JD 1968), and George Mason University (MFA 1992), with undergraduate language and literature studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, the University of Madrid, the University of Munich, and the Goethe-Institut. Jones has published ten collections of poems, most recently Nearing Palenque (Reflections on Native America) (FootHills Publishing, 2012); and Beyond Existentialism (Foot- Hills, 2017) featuring his poems with a selection of his blackand- white photographs. Jones has also published his translations of the late Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez’s poems, Songbook of Absences (The Charioteer Press, Washington, DC, 1972; reprinted 1980) and, with the author, Dominican Republic poet Rei Berroa’s Spanish poems, Book of Fragments (Writers Workshop, 1992). He was special guest writer at the sixteenth Rocky Mountain Writers Festival, Pocatello, Idaho, March 27–April 1 (2006).
AKIRA NISHIMURA
Akira Nishimura was born in the state of Paraná, Brazil, and is is currently living in the city of São Paulo with his partner Glauco Mattoso. He lived abroad for almost ten years, including four years in Japan as a dekassegui (someone of Japanese descendant working abroad), and in Canada, where he earned a BA in General Studies from Redeemer University College. Nishimura then returned to Brazil to start his language teaching career. In 2009, he published his first book of short homoerotic stories, The Apprentice, by Black Devil Press. He is currently revising his partner’s books while teaching classes at a language school.
IDRA NOVEY
Idria Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. For her poetry and translation she has received awards from the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. Her co-translations (with Ahmad Nadalizadeh) of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian came out with Penguin in 2020.
WILLIAM O’DALY
William O’Daly has translated eight books of Pablo Neruda’s late-career and posthumous poetry, and most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight, a finalist for the 2018 Northern California Book Award in Translation. All were published by Copper Canyon Press. O’Daly’s chapbooks of poems include The Whale in the Web (Copper Canyon), The Road to Isla Negra (Folded Word Press, 2015), Water Ways (Folded Word, 2017, a collaboration with JS Graustein), and Yarrow and Smoke (Folded Word’s 2018 Masters Series title). A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry and was profiled by Mike Leonard for The Today Show. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his essay “Creative Collisions: Poetry as a Transformative Act” was a finalist for Tiferet Journal’s 2018 Writing Contest.
BARBARA PASCHKE
Barbara Paschke has been involved in translation for many years, as translator, editor, and advocate. She co-edited and was a contributing translator to two collections of Central American literature: Volcán (poetry) and Clamor of Innocence (short stories); and translated Daisy Zamora’s Riverbed of Memory (all from City Lights Books). Paschke also edited Roque Dalton’s Clandestine Poems (Curbstone). She has translated literary travel companions to Costa Rica, Cuba, and Spain. Her translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including writing on the Zapatista movement, First World, Ha Ha Ha! (City Lights Books) and Tomorrow Triumphant, selected poems of Otto René Castillo (Night Horn Books). She has served as board member and conference organizer for the American Literary Translators Association, for which she is also the initiator and host of the conference’s annual Declamación. Paschke serves on the board of the Center for the Art of Translation.
JESSICA POWELL
Jessica Powell has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo’s novel, Woman in Battle Dress (City Lights, 2015), a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her translation of Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (Mandel Vilar Press, 2016) was a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and made the longlist for the 2017 National Translation Award. Other translations include Pablo Neruda’s book-length poem, venture of the infinite man (City Lights Books, 2017); Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Melville House, 2013) and Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise (City Lights Books, 2019) (both co-translated with Suzanne Jill Levine); Edna Iturralde’s Green Was My Forest (Mandel Vilar Press, 2018); and Gabriela Wiener’s Nine Moons (Restless Books, 2020).
VÍCTOR RODRÍGUEZ NÚÑEZ
VÍCTOR RODRÍGUEZ NÚÑEZ is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over fifty collections of poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Swedish. He has been a riveting presence at the most important international literary festivals, having read in more than forty countries. In the last decade, his work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published seven book-length translations. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.
NORMAN SHAPIRO
Norman Shapiro was a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and distinguished professor of Literary Translation at Wesleyan University. Shapiro’s translations of a vast array of French poetry, theater, and fiction have been widely published. His Four Farces by Georges Feydeau was nominated for a National Book Award; and One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine won the Modern Language Association of America’s Scaglione Prize. Shapiro’s scholarship on French Caribbean poetry and the Négritude movement has been influential. He conceived, edited, and was one of the principal translators for Négritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean. First published in 1970, it is considered a fundamental anthology.
KATHERINE SILVER
Katherine Silver has translated more than forty works of contemporary and modern literature written in Spanish. Her most recent and forthcoming publications include works by María Sonia Cristoff, Daniel Sada, César Aira, Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. She is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), and the author of Echo Under Story (What Books Press, 2019). She does volunteer legal interpreting for asylum seekers.
ANNETTE SMITH
Annette Smith is a scholar and translator whose literary translations have focused primarily on Aimé Césaire, helping to bring about a revival of interest in the Martinique poet. Some of her most important translations include Césaire: The Collected Poetry (University of California Press, 1983), crafted in collaboration with Clayton Eshleman, hailed as a fundamental work for readers of twentieth-century poetry. She also worked with Eshleman on a translation of Césaire’s masterful and highly influential long poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan, 2001). In collaboration with Dominic Thomas, she published Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2013), containing poems from the beginning and end of Césaire’s career, as well as previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed. A scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, Smith began teaching at the California Institue of Technology in 1970. She has served as professor of literature emeritus since 1993.
EMILY TODER
Emily Toder is a translator, poet, and archivist. She received degrees in literary translation from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has translated poetry, prose, and plays by Felipe Benítez Reyes, Laura Fernández, and Edgar Bayley, among other Spanish and Latin American writers, and is the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks. She lives in her native New York City where she runs a tiny letterpress operation and works in information management.
WILL VANDERHYDEN
Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in Literary Translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, and Fernanda García Lao, among others. Vanderhyden’s translations have appeared in journals such as Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, and The Arkansas International. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.
PAUL M. WORLEY
Paul M. Worley is an associate professor of global literature at Western Carolina University. He is the author of Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (2013; with oral performance from this book project at tsikbalichmaya.org), and with Rita M. Palacios is co-author of Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019). He is a Fulbright Scholar and a 2018 winner of the Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. In addition to his academic work, Worley has translated selected works by Indigenous authors such as Hubert Malina, Adriana López, and Ruperta Bautista, serves as editor-at-large for Mexico for the journal of world literature in English translation, Asymptote, and as poetry editor for the North Dakota Quarterly.
RICHARD ZENITH
Richard Zenith was born in Washington, DC, but has lived for many years in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, researcher and critic. He has published poems and short stories but is best known for his work on Fernando Pessoa. Besides preparing numerous editions, such as the Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) and the seven-volume Obra Essencial de Fernando Pessoa, he has published essays on Pessoa and translated much of his poetry and prose into English. Zenith has also translated poetry by the Galician-Portuguese troubadours, Luís de Camões, Sophia de Mello Breyner, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and many living poets.
MARC ZIMMERMAN
Marc Zimmerman has helped lead LACASA, a publishing and resource center that looks at Latin American and Latino cultural studies through a globalization perspective, since he was named it’s first director in 1988. He now leads LACASA Chicago, specializing in Chicago Latino art and literature. Two of the many books he has written outside of LACASA include Literature and Resistance in Guatemala (Ohio University Press, 1995) and Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 1990). His translations of Central American poets have appeared in many journals. He is professor emeritus of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and of World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, where he served as chair from 2002 to 2008. Zimmerman served on the jury of Casa de las Américas and has won Fulbright and Rockefeller Fellowships, among other major awards.
MARK EISNER
Mark Eisner has spent most of the past two decades working
on projects related to Pablo Neruda. In 2018, Ecco published
his NERUDA: The Biography of a Poet (in hardcover as The Poet’s
Calling), named a finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize
for Biography. Eisner also conceived, edited, and was one of
the principal translators for City Lights’ The Essential Neruda:
Selected Poems (2004). He also wrote the introduction to City
Lights’ first-ever English translation of Neruda’s venture of the
infinite man (2017). He is now developing a documentary on
Neruda. An initial version, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the
Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit in Film.
Eisner was also involved in the early stages of the Red Poppy
Art House in San Francisco, and continues to lead Red Poppy, a
literary nonprofit focused on Latin American poetry. He is currently
at work on a new book about the revolutionary photographer
Tina Modotti’s life and work in Mexico during the 1920s.
In 1995, Eisner earned a BA with distinction in Political
Science with a focus on Latin America, and high honors in English/
Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. In 2000,
he received a fellowship to pursue an MA degree from Stanford
University in Latin American Studies, where he subsequently
served as a research fellow and then as a visiting scholar.
He contributed several new translations to Resistencia.
TINA ESCAJA
Tina Escaja is a Spanish American author, digital artist, and Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont. As a literary critic, she has published extensively on gender and contemporary Latin American and Spanish poetry and technology. Considered a pioneer in electronic literature, Escaja’s creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Her collection of poems, Manual Destructivista/Destructivist Manual (2016), with translations from the original Spanish by Kristin Dykstra, was selected among top ten bilingual readings by the Latino Poetry Review in 2017. Among other recognitions and awards, she received in 2003 the Dulce María Loynaz International Poetry Prize for her collection Caída Libre. In 2015, Fomite Press published a bilingual edition of the collection, translated by Mark Eisner (co-editor of this anthology). Escaja’s poems, fiction, and digital work have appeared in numerous anthologies and have been translated into six languages. She is the instigator of the Destructivist/a Movement, initiated on the grave of Vicente Huidobro in October of 2014, and she travels around the world performing Destructivist/a happenings. Escaja has also served as vice president and president of international organizations, such as the Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualides (Association of Gender and Sexualities Studies); Feministas Unidas, Inc.; and ALDEEU (Association of Spanish Professionals in the Americas), and is currently corresponding member of ANLE (American Academy of the Spanish Language) and vice-president of Red Poppy. A selection of Escaja’s literary and digital projects can be experienced at www.tinaescaja.com.